In hindsight, Creighton alumna’s career makes perfect scents

By Micah Mertes

Suzanne McCormick, BA’87, lives and works in the world of fragrance.

McCormick joined the industry nearly 34 years ago, when she was hired by Firmenich, a fragrance house. She completed an extensive fragrance training course before joining Firmenich’s fine fragrance team in New York City. In 2006, she joined Method Products as senior director of fragrance. Today, she is the senior director of global fragrance for SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands, which now owns Method.

“When I started at Method almost 20 years ago, it was this small brand,” McCormick said. When the Belgian company Ecover bought Method in 2012, McCormick’s employer became the world’s largest seller of green cleaning products. Now at SC Johnson, McCormick leads the fragrance development team for Ecover, Method and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day.  (In addition to her work in the fragrance industry, McCormick serves on the Board of Directors of ICA Cristo Rey High School in San Francisco.)

Making the fragrances for personal care and cleaning products that millions of people use every day was not something McCormick could have imagined when she was a Creighton student. But she said her well-rounded liberal arts education nonetheless prepared her for the unique combination of notes that shaped her life and career after Creighton.

We spoke with McCormick about life as a fragrance developer, her favorite smell and why it’s always important to follow your nose.

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I’m pretty confident in saying that no other Creighton alumnus has a job like yours.

McCormick: Like most people, I previously didn’t know this field even existed. But once I did learn about it, how could you not be curious? I’ve now been in fragrance for 34 years. I feel very lucky to have found it. Every project is new, every trend is new, every idea. What keeps me so interested is the behavioral psychology of it. What drives people? What draws people? How does fragrance transport people?

Can you describe your role and what it entails?

McCormick: I’m a fragrance developer. So the perfumers are the ones at our fragrance house partner who create the fragrance formulas. As the global lead of the fragrance development team, I work with the SC Johnson brands Method, Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day and Ecover in Europe to define fragrance strategy and hone the olfactive character of the brands across different product categories. We also work with fragrance house partners to develop the scents for our brands. We collaborate with their creative teams to identify opportunities for new fragrances in body wash, body mist and other products. Back at our home office, we have our own fragrance and formulation labs, where we build the products together once we receive the fragrance oil from the house, adapt it, perform safety testing and scale it up for manufacturing.

So you’re at the center of every part of the process: scientific, technical, creative.

McCormick: At the beginning of every project, we’re all talking and making sure we’re aligned. Along the way, you’re evaluating and modifying fragrances. We might like a fragrance but want a different top note or we need more floral or the base note isn’t substantive enough. And that brings us back to the molecular structure, so you need to collaborate with the perfumers on a modification.

I need to be able to help take the consumer’s feelings and put them into the technical person’s language. I’m a translator between the brand and the perfumers.

So, even though your career in fragrance was unexpected, your Creighton degree in organizational communication has proven to be really relevant.

McCormick: My career wasn't a straight line, and I always tell younger folks that it’s OK if yours isn’t either. I learned many things at Creighton that have served me well throughout my career. I learned to always surround yourself with great, smart people. Never stop adapting. Be open to unlikely opportunities, like being invited to join an industry you had never considered. I was also surrounded by so many people in science at Creighton, which I think helped me learn to work in lockstep between the artistic and the scientific sides of fragrance development. Looking back on it all now, I can see this field was always the perfect marriage of what I love: the creativity and the technical side.

What are some skills that would suit someone joining the fragrance industry? 

McCormick: You need to have and develop olfactive acuity, or a sense of smell. But memory association is also key. Your sense of smell is your closest link to memory, which is why it can create such a strong emotional connection.

Yeah, I smelled a candle the other day, and I was overwhelmed with nostalgia that took me a while to pinpoint.

McCormick: What did it remind you of?

It smelled like my hometown swimming pool. I doubt I’d even thought of it in more than a decade.

McCormick: Smell memory is so powerful. It’s visceral.

What’s something people wouldn’t know about a career in fragrance?

McCormick: We can’t wear any fragrances to work because we’re smelling products and materials all day, so you can’t have scents that interfere. No fragrance, lotion or perfume.

What is your personal favorite fragrance or family of fragrances?

McCormick: Oh, we get that question all the time, and it’s like asking, “Who is your favorite child?” Personally, I love floral green fragrances. But in our fragrance selection teams, we all have to overcome our subjective preferences and choose what’s best for each brand. And that also comes into play when you’re naming the fragrance and choosing the product's color.

How do you go about doing that for Method and Mrs. Meyer’s?

McCormick: Some big brands do large-scale panel testing where, for a product’s final fragrance, no one loves it, and no one hates it. It’s super safe. We don’t do that with our brands. We want to elicit love, that emotional connection. We follow what’s winning in the marketplace, but we create fragrances with our own signature and always march to our own drum. But things are always changing in fragrances, definitely so right now.

How so?

McCormick: There are trends across product categories, but here’s one example. We were just on a call about the men’s category of personal care fragrances. Traditionally, fragrances have been gendered for their different notes. Floral notes are considered more inherently feminine, woody notes are considered more inherently masculine, that kind of thing. But Gen Z does not want to be told what to smell like. They want to mix notes and use fragrance as a form of self-expression, their signature. Young people are also transforming the fragrance industry through social media, where influencers can make things go viral. We had a fragrance that someone made go viral.

What was that?

McCormick: It was a Method limited-edition body wash called Feeling Jazzed. Someone said it smelled like a Billie Eilish fragrance. It wasn’t based on that fragrance, of course; it was just in the same fragrance family. But when it went viral, we couldn’t make enough of it. We’ve since brought it into our everyday line, and now we’re making a Feeling Jazzed shampoo and conditioner, too.

Final word goes to you: What’s something you would like fragrance connoisseurs and enthusiasts to know?

McCormick: Actually, I was thinking, if there is a Creighton student reading this, I would want them to know that in the fragrance industry, there are so many different jobs, whether it’s in marketing, leadership, chemistry or design. This is an art and a science; it’s analytical and creative. If any of these intrigues you as a career pursuit after Creighton, I encourage you to reach out to me.